Broken Hearts: A Dark Captive Romance (Heartbreaker Book 2) Read online

  I groaned as I felt her muscles loosen then immediately clamp down on me again. The way her pussy pulsed on me was fucking incredible. “Good girl,” I grunted. “Such a good little girl for me.”

  As I fucked her deep and hard, holding her up against the bars, I put my head down and sucked at her nipples, alternating between the two peaks. They were like knives, so fucking stiff with desire, and they were wet and red from my mouth in seconds. Celeste screamed and gasped, her delicate body squirming in my arms as I slammed in and out of her. I was going balls deep, and she was taking every inch like the dirty little whore she’d always secretly wanted to be.

  Her pussy was so wet for me now that it made muffled squelching noises every time I withdrew, and her face turned pink with shame at the sound. “Don’t be embarrassed,” I growled in her ear. “I want you this wet for me every fucking day.”

  That was enough to push her over the precipice. She fell apart, gasping and screaming as her lungs struggled to fill with air. My balls drew tight as she came on my cock, her pussy trying to milk the cum out of me. It was working, but I didn’t want to come yet. I wanted this to last, wanted to make her fucking explode again and again.

  I pulled out and shifted our position, forcing Celeste down onto her hands and knees on the grey concrete, gorgeous ass and pussy on display. “You want more?” I said, roughly gripping her hips before delivering a hard slap to her firm ass.

  Her answering moan was enough for me to know she wanted it. I slapped her again, hard enough to leave red handprints blooming on the delicate white skin of her ass cheeks, and then I aligned my cock with her pussy and didn’t wait a second longer. I slammed into her and fucked her tight cunt in long, hard strokes, making her shriek as I pounded her deep, too deep.

  The scent of her arousal filled my nostrils, making me groan loudly. I never wanted to let go. Never wanted to stop fucking her. Her pussy was even tighter in this position, and I felt my orgasm rising against my will, rushing to the surface. “Fuck,” I grunted. “You need this. You fucking need this.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  I remembered all the times she told me she hated me. All the times she claimed she’d never beg for me. She tried so hard to pretend she didn’t want me, tried so hard to deny me. But the truth was she fucking wanted me all along. Part of her knew it from the start, from the very day I took her, when she looked into my eyes from the trunk of the car. As much as she tried to push back, as much as another part of her mind told her to stop, it all came flooding out eventually, and now that desire was right here, wetting my dick so wonderfully as I pounded into her.

  “Yes… yes, sir,” she whispered as I reached one hand around to furiously rub at her clit. “Oh… oh, fuck….”

  “Take it all,” I muttered, slamming into her so deep I grazed her cervix. She cried out, and I tightened my grip on her left hip. “Take every fucking inch and be grateful, slut.”

  “Thank you,” she gasped, more moans of pleasure bubbling up inside her. “Thank you, sir.”

  “You’re mine. All mine.” I slapped her ass again, leaving another print. It was exactly what she needed. I felt her cunt contract around me in another climax, and I grunted, barely able to hold on as she screamed and whimpered through the waves of ecstasy.

  I pumped into her four more times before stilling my body, digging my fingernails into her delicate skin as I roared out my orgasm. I made sure she took every drop of my cum, made sure I marked her insides with my seed.

  Finally, I pulled out and stared down at her pussy. It was swollen and pink, droplets of white slipping out of the entrance. Fucking perfect.

  Celeste panted and rolled over, holding herself up with her hands planted behind her on the concrete. Her lips were parted, her breaths heavy and rasping. Sweat was beaded on her forehead, just under her hairline, and a droplet slid down her red face, collecting on her upper lip. I hadn’t noticed this before, but there were a few small drops of my blood on her cheeks and forehead too.

  She was so beautiful.

  If anyone ever tried to hurt her, if anyone ever tried to touch her, I would destroy them. I wouldn’t stop until they were fucking annihilated.

  I stood, pulling her to her feet as well. “Tell me,” I said, forcing her chin up so that she had to look into my eyes. “Tell me what you are.”

  “I… I’m yours,” she whispered.

  “Say it again.”

  “I’m yours,” she said, more confident this time.

  “Yes. Yes, you fucking are,” I said. “Mine.”

  3

  Celeste

  Now that it was over, I was cold again. I shivered, goosebumps cropping up all over my skin. Alex took off his shirt and put it on me.

  “Time for you to get out of here,” he said softly.

  I quickly realized what he meant. I’d earned my ticket out of this underground shelter. Gained his trust. As much as I’d come to miss the familiarity of the cell when I wasn’t in it, my mind adjusted almost immediately, making me crave the outside world again.

  Alex carried me out of the shelter and into the house before leading me to my room—the big, comfortable space he’d created just for me. I knew I’d made the right choice now. He wasn’t going to kill me. This room, this house, this life… it wasn’t a lie. Alex was keeping me alive, and as long as I helped him and followed the rules, I could have anything I wanted.

  Except my freedom.

  I shoved that thought aside, not wanting to think too deeply about that. Not in this moment. Eventually, I knew I would, but for now, I just wanted to enjoy some creature comforts and forget the world for a while. After sleeping in a dirty gray underground cell every night, I figured I deserved just a few selfish, spoiled moments to myself. At the very least, I deserved a hot shower. I was still speckled in Dan’s blood. It had dried on parts of my skin in encrusted little droplets, and I wanted to scrub myself till my skin was raw.

  Alex seemed to read my mind. He led me right into the opulent bathroom and nodded at the shower. “Take a shower, then get dressed. We still have a lot to talk about.”

  I bowed my head. “Yes, sir. We do.”

  “I just have to dispose of Mr. Vallone’s body.” He frowned. “It’s a shame he felt the need to threaten you like that. If he kept his mouth shut, I could’ve kept him for longer.”

  I shook my head. “No, sir, it would be pointless. He was loyal to the Circle. He told me he would never tell you anything.”

  “They all say that at first. Until they don’t,” he said crisply. I suddenly pictured him violently torturing and ripping his previous victims apart, piece by little piece. The image was stark in my mind, but it was still so hard to reconcile it with the man standing before me. The man who said all he wanted was to protect me. “But, no matter,” he went on. “We’ll find out more without him, won’t we?”

  With that, he curtly nodded and stepped out of the room. I followed his orders (and my own needs) and stepped into the shower, turning the water onto full blast.

  As the hot water streamed over me, dirt and blood and cum dripped down my legs, swirling together in a macabre pattern on the light marble-tiled shower floor before slipping down the drain. I shuddered, tearing my eyes away from the sight.

  The shame was inching back in now, making my skin crawl. I’d just been fucked by a confirmed killer, a man who cut another’s throat right in front of me with zero remorse. I had that man’s seed dripping out of me right now. And I fucking loved it.

  What the hell did that say about me?

  When I was scrubbed raw, I turned the shower off, dried myself, and headed into the enormous walk-in closet. After choosing a black and white lace bra and panty set, a mocha-colored cable knit sweater, and black jeans, I dressed and stepped deeper into the closet, checking out the mirrored white vanity which sat at the end. The drawers were filled with makeup, perfume, nail varnish and all sorts of moisturizing creams and potions.

  Robotically, I sat and began to play
around with the makeup, dusting brown eyeshadow onto my eyelids and experimenting with a shimmery highlighter that made my dull skin glow with a golden hue. It felt so silly, so self-centered, to be applying cosmetics while a serial killer cleaned up the mess of a bloody corpse only yards away on the property, but I needed this right now. I needed something from the outside world to make me feel like a real person, anything, and this makeup session was doing the trick.

  I almost felt like I was back in the real world for a moment, just a spoiled little girl playing with her expensive, pretty toys. But then I remembered that in the actual real world, I was a poor struggling college student who could never afford any of this stuff. The Chanel foundation alone probably cost a week’s worth of my rent, and the little bottles of Le Labo perfume were likely worth two or three times that.

  So this place was still an escape from reality. Funny in a twisted way, because I’d spent so long trying to get away from here only to decide it was an escape in itself.

  Alex finally returned to my room three hours later. By then, I was curled up on the bed reading one of the many books that lined the shelves in this enormous place. When he opened the door and stepped in, it occurred to me that I hadn’t even checked to see if I was locked in this room while he was out. I’d just stayed in here and accepted it.

  “You have questions for me,” Alex said. It wasn’t a question in itself. It was a statement.

  I nodded and closed my book. “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll answer what I can for now, and you have permission to speak freely. But I do have to go out soon, so we don’t have very long.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Work. I have a private consult in the city.”

  “Oh.” It was strange to imagine Alex heading off to work like any other regular person, helping out his fellow human beings at the hospital, while in his downtime he was off maiming and murdering the scum of society. “What exactly do you do?”

  “I originally specialized in general surgery, then later specialized in neurosurgery and pain medicine. So I do consults at the hospital and occasionally some other clinics, and the occasional surgery as well. But seeing as it’s mostly consults, I actually have a decent amount of spare time now.”

  “So it’s not like Grey’s Anatomy where you’re running around a hospital eighty hours a week.”

  He chuckled. “No. It was like that, at a time, when I was younger.”

  I frowned. “Is that when you seemed to go on a break from killing?” I remembered from all my studies of the case that after the first few murders, the Heartbreaker had stopped killing for several years. At the time, investigators thought he’d died or moved on from the city, until he finally resurfaced again in late 2006. He’d continued his off-and-on pattern of murders ever since.

  Alex nodded. “That’s right. I was very busy pursuing my career. It’s not easy to work almost a hundred hours a week as a surgical intern at a hospital and track down potential marks at the same time.”

  “I guess it was worth it, though. Now you’re a rich doctor,” I said softly. And a serial killer, but you know, that’s totally par for the course….

  He smiled gently. “I can’t take credit for all of it. My mother and stepfather helped me out a lot and made some investments for me and my sisters, Abigail and Lina, when we were very young. It paid off a lot in recent years. That’s how I could afford this place.”

  My brows rose slightly. In all the time I’d been here, I hadn’t even considered that Alex might actually have a family somewhere out there. I was glad he was opening up to me, though, even sharing some of their names with me. It seemed intimate, made me feel closer to him.

  “Do your parents live near here?”

  Alex frowned and shook his head. “My mother and stepfather moved to Maine years ago. My biological father lives in California, but I never saw much of him anyway.”

  “And your sisters?”

  “They aren’t around either. It’s just me here.”

  “That must be lonely.”

  “I don’t mind it.”

  I looked down and chewed my bottom lip. “I wanted to ask about my mother,” I said softly. Thoughts of her and her role in my father’s sick lifestyle had plagued my mind for a while now, but I never got the chance to ask about it yesterday.

  Alex finally sat, his forehead creased. “What do you want to know?”

  “Dan sort of put some ideas in my head—”

  He interrupted. “I know. I was listening.”

  “How?”

  “Via a tiny recorder I stuck to a wall, unbeknownst to either of you,” he said. “And for the record, I’ve never drugged your water.”

  “Oh. Right.” I nodded. Of course he was listening. “Then you know he also… he said you would want to punish my whole family for what my father did. He said you probably sped up my mother’s death.”

  Alex’s lips were downturned as he listened. “That’s ridiculous,” he replied, his tone no-nonsense. “I helped your mother as much as I could. She was very sick for a long time. I helped her pain as long as she could stand it. When she died, that was all natural. I didn’t help her along. If I wanted her dead, I could’ve done it years ago.”

  “That’s what I thought, but….” I nibbled my lip again, trying to find a way to piece together my fearful thoughts. “Why didn’t you kill her? I mean, you knew she knew about my father. Didn’t you view her as guilty? And… was she?”

  The question made me feel sick. My mother hadn’t been perfect—in fact she was downright awful for a large period of my childhood due to her drinking—but the idea that she could’ve been complicit in my father’s activities made bile rise in my throat. Sure, she screamed and argued with my father when he announced his intentions to give me to the Circle, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t already aware of his lifestyle. Maybe she was okay with him doing what he did to young girls, and only started to argue when her own child was at stake.

  At least I knew why she drank so much, though. It was pure guilt. It wound up killing her.

  Alex sighed and rubbed his chin. “I had a feeling you’d ask that first.”

  I crossed my arms. “And?”

  “Your mother tried her best. She wasn’t one of them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I heard everything that day. She wasn’t aware of his secret side at all. Not until the day he informed her what he was doing with you on your next birthday. She knew less than you did before that. He took you to all those parties, after all, but never her. She was clueless.”

  “How could she not know anything?”

  “He was the Police Chief. Always out, always busy, always invited to lots of events. She had no reason to suspect anything, and he hid it so well. She thought him taking you to all these so-called social events was just him being a good father and being very invested in his relationship with you.” He looked down for a second, then frowned, his forehead creasing into deeper lines. “Your father was ruthless. I can honestly say I saw and heard true evil that day, Celeste.”

  My heart began to beat faster. “What did he do to her?”

  “You’d already run up the stairs by this point, so you didn’t see. But he was so calm as she screamed and shouted. He even laughed at her, like it was a joke how defensive she was of her little daughter. Then he picked up a pistol. His demeanor never changed. Calm, collected, and smooth.”

  “He threatened to kill her?” I swallowed hard.

  “Oh, no. Much worse.” Alex’s jaw tightened. “He held the gun to her head and told her she had two choices. One, she could keep her mouth shut and let him do what he wanted with you. Or two, she could decide to be against him, in which case he was going to call you downstairs and shoot you to death right then and there, just to punish her.”

  When he was finished speaking, I keeled over on the bed, immediately feeling as if I’d been kicked in the guts. My mother’s choice had been to either let me die that day in front
of her with a bullet lodged somewhere in my body, or to let me live despite knowing I would be given up for horrifying sexual, mental, and physical abuse.

  Neither option was good, in fact both were horrendous… but she’d chosen the option that at least kept me alive longer than only a few more minutes. She knew I’d be subjected to all sorts of awful things, but the way she saw it, at least I was still alive.

  “But what kind of life would that be?” I whispered, more to myself than Alex.

  He seemed to know exactly what I’d been thinking, and he nodded. “She thought she made the right choice, but immediately afterwards, she realized neither was right. I think she thought perhaps things would be better if she let you die quickly and mercifully to a gun.”

  “But then she didn’t have to.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “No, because I killed that merciless, spineless piece of shit that called himself your father. But your mother… she suffered from that guilt forever. She had to sit there every day for the rest of her life and remember how she’d agreed to let him give you up to his sick cronies. Even though it was coerced at gunpoint, she could never escape that crushing guilt.”

  Tears gathered in my eyes for what felt like the millionth time in the last day or so. I let them fall, not even bothering to wipe them away. “So you really did help her when she was sick. You didn’t want her dead.”

  “No, I didn’t want her dead. I do wish she had been a better mother to you after John’s death, but the alcohol got in the way too much.”

  “She was sorry for that,” I whispered.

  “I know. She was a troubled woman, angel. She tried. I could see that much. But after what your father did to her, the way he broke her down that day, things were just never the same. It was like he leeched the life out of her.”

  I sat up again and grabbed a pillow to lean on, digging my fingernails into the soft fabric. “Why didn’t the Circle kill her right away? Surely they knew that my father had told her what was going to happen.”